A few comments:

Agreed. JC flopped because of bad marketing, not because of problems with the film per se. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And of course, the SpaceX Dragon will be launching to the ISS on a Falcon 9 on April 30 - that's a milestone in commercial spaceflight if ever there was one!

During my recent trip to Mississippi, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours talking to a retired engineer from the Stennis Space Centre. He used to work on qualifying the huge external shuttle fuel tanks. The man was a complete space nerd, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about the SSME tests, and…

"Other" probably includes Portuguese, French, German, Russian, and Scandinavian ships of various stripes, I would imagine. Regarding the apparent dominance of the Dutch in the mid-1800s, as Ben says, the peculiar sampling of the data set (for climatological purposes) produces artifacts like that, and wasn't, in…

Apropos shipping news ... RIP Mærsk McKinney Møller

The answer is that it would start off by annoying Irish bookshop owners, and needing a severe haircut.

It's certainly not a mathematical proof, just a bit of rather questionable high-school physics. Also:

Dead Ringers ... excellent.

About that chirality thing ...

Quite.

Also, while I'm sure that most people have at least *heard* of radiocarbon dating, how many actually know how it works? You could perhaps have used a paragraph to explain, without reference to C-14 dating, how Sm-146 radiometry actually lets you measure the age of the rocks instead of the daft Jesus-riding-a-dinosaur…

1) Carbon-14 dating is, as I said, limited to 60,000 years old.

From Copenhagen to Aarhus - I read the warning as: "This route has trolls."

"... samarium-146 (146Sm) (an isotope which, like Carbon-14, can be used to measure the age of very old rocks)"

Also marine biologist, Dr John Fish: [www.aber.ac.uk]

"How cooking turned humans into an invasive species" ...

[East End gangster voice a la the Kray Twins]: "That's a very nice planet you got there. Wouldn't want to see it *burned to the ground*, wouldya? So cough up some insurance, we'll see you're all right ..."

On the other hand, Dr Wellington Yueh overcame his Suk conditioning, with the right incentive ...

I remember visiting Danish catalyst company Haldor Topsøe in 2003, and watching videos of carbon nanotubes growing off of nickel catalysts. They found them by accident, initially, as they were quenching the catalyst. Here's a link to the 2004 Nature paper that came out of that: